Sunday, January 18, 2015

[CW] Caves of Mars - Victory!

While my starting point technically support win and lose conditions, there wasn't really much of a game there. After putting in about 12 hours over the last 4 days I have actual winning and losing, as well as a much richer set of mechanics and improved UI. I didn't get done everything I'd hoped (though my goal list was unrealistic for the timeframe), but I accomplished more than enough to feel comfortable calling this a victory! The enjoyment of playing it is now one of the things that slows my development :)

- a number of new entity abilities (e.g. if you hit quiescent fungus it has a chance to awaken into spreading fungus)

- an AI framework that supports a mix of behaviors and state-based evaluation, plus a couple of new AI styles in that framework

- much richer system for digging

The final narrative line and theme ended up as something of a bittersweet sci-fi horror story, and I'm pretty pleased with it.

This was a blast, and I'm really glad I made time to participate! I got a lot done and learned a lot about building this kind of game. I still have a lot more things I want to add to Caves of Mars. Though rate of progress will be much slower, I will definitely continue to work on it.

The next major pieces (post-jam) are:
- more monsters, including ranged ones
- richer combat system (i.e. separate to-hit and damage)

Thanks :) There have been many really, really good games from this jam session!

One of my todo dev pieces is adding a separate screen/section for messages and help, and I'd show keybindings there by default. Also, it currently uses the traditional 80x24 screen size, so instead of a separate html element I might just increase the screen size to give room for that kind of thing.